Fritz Malone is a former cop and the illegitimate son of the former police commissioner of New York City. WIth that background, you’d expect him to be a super gumshoe; when he casually stops to watch a Thanksgiving parade and sees a gunman firing into a crowd, he gets dragged into a duel of wits (or wills, really) between someone calling himself Nightmare and the mayor of New York.
Malone is a likable character, in part because he’s a sort of Everyman PI. He’s not blessed with the physique of Lee Child’s Reacher or Robert Parker’s Hawk, and he makes some critical mistakes as he tries to get to the bottom of Nightmare’s plan. The supporting characters (including Malone’s girlfriend, his highly dysfunctional family, and a couple of NYPD beat cops) are well-enough drawn, and Hawke moves the plot along rapidly. Unfortunately, the denouement was unbelievable, at least to me; it wasn’t plausible to me, and that undid a lot of the work that Hawke had done to build a credible story. Not a bad read, though.
(Note: this is billed as a “debut novel” but it’s not. Richard Hawke is a pen name for Tim Cockey, an accomplished mystery writer. For that reason, I guess I expected a bit more.)
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